Israel will reveal plans to build 1,400 settler homes in the West Bank and in east Jerusalem to coincide with the weekend release of Palestinian prisoners, military radio said Friday. A third batch of Palestinian prisoners is due to be released on Sunday…

This post was republished using Repost. Please read it on Informed Comment directly: http://www.juancole.com/2013/12/israel-squatter-palestinian.html

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“Palestinians have warned repeatedly that settlement building undermines the fragile peace process which US Secretary of State John Kerry struggled to revive after a three-year hiatus.”

Palestinians are not the only ones expressing the view that settlement building on the West Bank undermines the peace process. That has been the official position of the United States from the beginning. The problem has been that neither Republican nor Democratic Administrations over the past 45 years have been willing to implement the tough measures against Israel that would be necessary to stop it.

The Palestinian Authority has standing as abserver state of the U.N. to bring a complaint for war crimes by colonizing foreign territory before the International Criminal Court but cherishes its good relations with the Netanyahu government to undertake such drastic remedial action.

It’s also a perfidious insult to our Secretary of State and to the President. It should be rebuffed in unprecedented fashion as a violation of good faith and punished. I just posted ten ways in which that can be accomplished.

The “why” is because they are confident that they and their Lobby can successfully and permanently intimidate our political class and that they can also continue to dominate the discourse on Palestine generally here in the States. It’s brutal and reprehensible politics on Netanyahu’s part. It needs to be punished.